2020, 3(1) SWEDISH JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY
kritisk etno g rafi
kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology
About
kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology is owned and published by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi).
The journal is peer-reviewed, online, and publishes original research articles, as well as reports from Swedish anthropological community. kritisk etnografi aims to foster responsible scholarship with global scope, local relevance and public engagement.
Websites
www.ssag.se | www.kritisketnografi.se Editors
Professor Sten Hagberg, Uppsala University
Professor Jörgen Hellman, University of Gothenburg Editorial Committee
Professor Emeritus Gudrun Dahl, Stockholm University Professor Maris Gillette, University of Gothenburg Dr. Tova Höjdestrand, Lund University
Dr. Ulrik Jennische, President of the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT), Stockholm University
Dr. Steffen Jöhncke, University of Copenhagen Senior Researcher Kari Telle, Chr. Michelsen institute Associate Professor Paula Uimonen, Stockholm University Dr. Charlotta Widmark, Uppsala University
Design, layout and typesetting
Dr. Mats Hyvönen, Uppsala University Address
kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology c/o Prof. Sten Hagberg
Dept. of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology Thunbergsvägen 3H,
PO Box 631 SE-751 26 Uppsala Sweden
editors@kritisketnografi.se
URN ISBN
urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-419421 978-91-88929-33-4
Introductory Note by the Editors-in-Chief
Sten Hagberg and Jörgen Hellman...5 The Anthropology of Wellbeing in Troubled Times
Imaging Knowledge: Visual Anthropology, Storytelling and the Slow Path Toward Wisdom
Paul Stoller ... 11 Sensuous Scholarship and the Quest for Wellbeing
A. David Napier ... 21 Imagining World Solidarities for a Livable Future
Alisse Waterston ... 33 Activism as Care: Kathmandu, Paris, Toronto, New York City
Carole McGranahan ... 43 Bricolage
Of Rumors and Transfers: The Short Life of Western-Educated Women’s Associations in French Sudan (1955–1960)
Rosa de Jorio ... 63 Corona: Anthropology About a Pandemic – Panel Discussion of the Swedish
Anthropological Association
Tova Höjdestrand ... 83 Swedish PhD Dissertations in Anthropology and related disciplines 2018–2020 ... 87
Contact: Sten Hagberg sten.hagberg@antro.uu.se
© 2020 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
Introductory Note by the Editors-in-Chief
Sten Hagberg | Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University Jörgen Hellman | Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Gothenburg
This issue of kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology addresses a theme connected directly to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, namely the quest for wellbeing in troubled times. An anthropology of wellbeing, by definition itself, promotes the public engagement of anthropology; apropos, the contributors address how anthropology and anthropologists can and should contribute to wellbeing.
The issue themed “The Anthropology of Wellbeing in Troubled Times” has been coordinated by Professor Paul Stoller, the Medallist at the 2013 Vega Day, which was based on a symposium on Anthropology of Wellbeing. David Napier, Helena Wulff, and Kirin Narayan were other scholars presenting inspiring papers at the Vega Symposium. The symposium was instrumental in developing thoughts and ideas on starting an anthropological journal that five years later, manifested as kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology.
The issue includes articles by Paul Stoller, David Napier, Alisse Waterston, and Carole McGranahan. Stoller’s opening piece suggests that visual anthropology shows us a powerfully ethical way of practicing slow anthropology in a fast world. Stoller interrogates the work and practices of two visual anthropologists, Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl, arguing that their research methodologies and filmic strategies have been profoundly influenced by the slow epistemology of the Songhay (Rouch) and Fulani (Holtedahl) peoples of West Africa. As Stoller suggests, their works underscore the intellectual gifts of taking a slow path toward the production of knowledge.
David Napier scrutinises the conflict between the Enlightenment’s concept of human identity based on rationalism, science, and individual achievement, on the one hand, and the recognition of 18th century German Romanticism wherein self-awareness and self- fulfilment were the outcomes of emotion and intuition, and a relationship between personal experience and individual emotion, on the other. The conflict was epitomised in Sturm und Drang where the extreme expression of individual emotional states emerged in response to rationalism’s perceived degradation of emotional life. Yet human wellbeing lost its emotional completeness when reason emerged as the primary source of knowledge. In contrast to these, Napier argues that modern anthropology has shown how emotional rootedness, being the basis of wellbeing, can be recaptured through sustained fieldwork, and in particular, through the extroverted risk that builds emotional rootedness with others.
Alisse Waterston inquires into Eduardo Galeano’s challenge to exercise the right to dream, calling on anthropologists to couple their knowledge with fearless imagination to work on behalf of a liveable future that has yet to come. The current condition of the
world, marked by the coronavirus pandemic, worship of weapons and militarism, racialised hatred and nationalist fervour, environmental crisis and everyday structural violence, adds urgency to the task of confronting the profound challenges facing humanity, transcending seemingly impossible impasses, and building productive connections and collaborations.
Waterston argues for unifying the scholar and the responsible global citizen, going beyond producing scholarship, putting knowledge to work in an effort at sustaining the earth and its living beings.
Carole McGranahan concludes the special issue with the straightforward and yet tricky question: “What are the possibilities for well-being in exile?” She draws on her own ethnographic research in Tibetan communities in Canada, France, India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the USA including research regarding activism in the coronavirus pandemic. The Tibetan community draws on resources including concepts and practices from Tibetan Buddhism and the leadership of the Dalai Lama, its political action and community care forged in the different contexts of lack of citizenship in South Asia, on the one hand, and citizenship in the diaspora outside of it, on the other. Since China’s invasion and colonisation of Tibet, the diaspora has spread around the world while many Tibetans also remain inside Tibet as part of the People’s Republic of China. Notions of care embedded in Tibetan political activism enable possibilities for well-being even in times of loss.
The Bricolage section of kritisk etnografi sets off with an article by Rosa de Jorio, focusing on the activities of women’s organisations, their programs and their regional initiatives during the last period of colonisation of French Sudan (present-day Mali). Women activists and their organisation worked to improve the status of women both within and outside the household. Around the time of national independence in 1960, the ruling party US-RDA was morphing into a monolithic and autocratic machinery, intolerant vis-à-vis independent organisations, such as women’s groups. Party leadership resorted to tactics and strategies that divided women’s groups. de Jorio describes women’s efforts at resisting and influencing US-RDA’s gender politics, and investigates some of the reasons behind the demise of those groups. She also reflects on some Malian women’s critical engagement with their activist past in more recent times, as a way to develop a more gender-inclusive narrative of the nation.
The subsequent text comprises a report from the digital panel discussion hosted by the Swedish Anthropological Association (SANT), with four Swedish medical anthropologists on the theme COVID-19: Claudia Merli from Uppsala University, who has studied gendered bodily practices related to reproductive health, ethno-religious conflict in Southern Thailand, and aftermath of the tsunami in 2004; Fredrik Nyman from Durham University, whose dissertation project investigates neoliberal reform within the British health care system, focusing on self-management practices in support groups for elderly people with chronic respiratory diseases; Syna Ouattara from University of Gothenburg, who has conducted research on culture, environment and development in West Africa, focusing on the relevance of indigenous knowledge and has also worked for the World Health Organisation during the Ebola crisis in Guinea in, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Mirko Pasquini from Uppsala University, whose dissertation project departs from fieldwork at an emergency ward in Northern Italy, with a primary focus on triage, overcrowding, violence, mistrust and access to healthcare during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020.
Last but not the least, this issue also contains a list of abstracts of PhD Dissertations in Anthropology defended at Swedish Universities during two academic years, namely 2018-19 and 2019-20.
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The inaugural issue of kritisk etnografi dealt with “The Public Presence of Anthropology” (Vol 1, No 1, 2018). The second issue, which was also a double issue was themed “Comparative Municipal Ethnographies” (Vol 2, No 1-2, 2019). This issue inquires into “The Anthropology of Wellbeing in Troubled Times” (Vol 3, No 1, 2020). Our forthcoming issue will be based on “Putting Swedish Anthropology to Work” (Vol 3, No 2, 2020), examining Applied Anthropology with Lisa Åkesson and Maris Boyd Gillette as guest editors. The first issue of 2021 will be a VARIA, that is, an open issue of any research paper in the research fields pertinent to our journal. We look forward to papers from colleagues at Swedish universities and beyond. Spread the word! Aux plumes! Fatta pennan!
Contact: Paul Stoller PStoller@wcupa.edu
© 2020 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
Imaging Knowledge: Visual Anthropology,
Storytelling and the Slow Path Toward Wisdom
Paul Stoller | Professor of Anthropology, West Chester University, USA
ABSTRACT In this article, I suggest that visual anthropology shows us a powerfully ethical way – through sensuous narrative and shared anthropology – to practice slow anthropology in a fast world. In what follows I examine the work and practices of two great visual anthropologists, Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl. The research methodology and filmic strategies of these master anthropologists, I suggest, have been profoundly shaped by the slow epistemology of the Songhay (Rouch) and Fulani (Holtedahl) peoples of West Africa. Indeed, the visual narratives and filmic practices of Rouch and Holtedahl demonstrate powerfully the rewards of slowly developed storytelling and image-making. Their works underscore the intellectual gifts of taking a slow path toward the production of knowledge. Their films show us how to move forcefully and ethically into the anthropological future.
Keywords: epistemology, visual anthropology, West Africa
Anduryna kala suuru
“Life is patience” (Songhay proverb) N’da suuru go ni se, ni fonda ga feri
“If you are patient, your path will open,”(Songhay proverb)
The straight highway lies before us, but we cannot take it because it is permanently (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)
Introduction
Speed and expediency shape much of our contemporary learning. We tend to move quickly from subject to subject. Representations can be rapidly downloaded, scanned, reproduced, perused, edited and reconfigured – all to increase human understanding and connection.
But as philosopher Mark Taylor and sociologist Sherry Turkle have suggested the culture of speed, which has positively increased the spread of information, has also brought increases in social disconnection, eroded inter-personal empathy, and limited processes of thinking (Taylor 2014; Turkle 2016). There is no shortage of philosophical works that offer alternative approaches to living in the “culture of speed.” Having long conducted fieldwork in West Africa I believe that one alternative to the “culture of speed” is embodied in the wisdom of people like the Songhay of Niger. But can the wisdom of a non-Western culture offer ways to increase human connection, enhance inter-personal empathy and deepen contemplative thinking?
In this article, I suggest that visual anthropology shows us a powerfully ethical way – through sensuous narrative and shared anthropology – to practice slow anthropology in a fast
world. In what follows I examine the work and practices of two great visual anthropologists, Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl. The research methodology and filmic strategies of these master anthropologists, I suggest, have been profoundly shaped by the slow epistemology of the Songhay (Rouch) and Fulani (Holtedahl) peoples of West Africa. Indeed, the visual narratives and filmic practices of Rouch and Holtedahl demonstrate powerfully the rewards of slowly developed storytelling and image-making. Their works underscore the intellectual gifts of taking a slow path toward the production of knowledge. Their films show us how to move forcefully and ethically into the anthropological future.
The World According to Jean Rouch
Imagine the following scene. Sometime in the early 1980s you are in Paris. You enter the Musée de l'Homme. You climb a steep flight of marble stairs and turn toward a temporary partition that shields a small opening that leads to Jean Rouch’s Comité du Film Ethnographique office, which is abuzz with activity. Rouch sits behind a cluttered desk, perched on a platform that commands the office.
He is somehow simultaneously talking on the phone and debating some bureaucratic detail with his erstwhile associate, Françoise Foucault.
Tacked up haphazardly on the wall are countless photos of famous documentarians, filmmakers and actors. There are scores of boxes filled with photographs. Along the stairs that lead up to a second floor, you might stumble upon piles of haphazardly arranged metal cans containing scores of Rouch’s finished and unfinished films.
Amid this organized chaos, Rouch hangs up the phone and asks everyone to climb the stairs to his projection room, a small space with perhaps nine makeshift chairs. Some young documentarians have come to Paris to project their unfinished work to the master.
They are nervous.
What will he think?
A film is projected and Rouch asks for commentary. Most people at the screening discuss such things as camera angles, editing issues, sound quality and the texture of establishment shots. In time, Rouch, who, as always, sits in the front row, chimes in:
Where is the story in this film?
How can you fix the story?
What can you do so that the film connects with the audience?
These brief comments cut to heart of Jean Rouch’s project – the art of storytelling, the importance of which he learned from his Songhay mentors in the Republics of Niger and
Figure 1: Jean Rouch Toasting the Rouch 2000 Retrospective at New York University.
Photograph: Françoise Foucault
Mali. For them, deep knowledge is conveyed through narrative, which has the capacity to evoke complexity through the elegant simplicity of stories. The power of the story, Rouch taught me, emerges not just from the tale that is told, but from the more profound context of longstanding friendship and trust – shared anthropology. Jean Rouch’s oeuvre also demonstrates that scholars and filmmakers are the custodians of knowledge. As custodians, the most important obligation is to tell stories that convey this cherished knowledge to the next generation. These principles, which are evoked in Jean Rouch’s films and texts, are the bedrock of Songhay epistemology and the foundation of Songhay wisdom. It takes time and patience for the mind to develop, for practices to be refined, for a person to become a master of her or his work. And once that mastery is achieved, the master’s greatest obligation is to pass the knowledge on to the next generation (See Henley 2009; Feld 2003; Predal, 1982).
The World According to Lisbet Holtedahl
You stand before the entrance to Sultan Issa Maigari’s vast palace, an imposing image. Then you move inside the palace’s dark corridors and find the Sultan, dressed in a splendidly embroidered purple robe, making his way through the dark sinewy corridors of his palace.
He sees one of his young toddlers and picks him up. Together they move toward the light of the inner courtyard. In the distance you see a team of women cleaning the compound with whisks fashioned from dried grass. Beyond the women, you see the Sultan’s magnificent horse. Courtiers prepare the stallion for the Sultan, who will ride it into the center of Ngaoundere to meet the Cameroonian Minister of the Interior – the juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern, a sign of irrevocable change. As the Sultan approaches his horse, court musicians, in tribute to their ruler, blow their trumpets. The Sultan mounts his horse.
Surrounded by an entourage of courtiers Sultan Issa Maigari slowly makes his way to the center of town, all symbolic of the longstanding religious and political prestige of the royal ruler. This slow take in The Sultan’s Burden (Holtedahl 1995) underscores the slow pace of everyday life – even in the royal enclaves of the Northern Cameroon Adamawa Sultanate.
This scene depicts life as it has been lived in this far-away place – or does it?
By taking us deep into the corridors of Sultan Issa Maigari’s palace viewers get a complex portrait of the Sultan, who is the spiritual and political leader of the Adamawa Province of Northern Cameroon. He is sauntering slowly among his wives, his children, his advisors and his praise-singers. It is an intimate glimpse – the result of years of shared anthropology – into the character of a proud, traditional leader who has the daunting challenge of confronting the irrevocable loss of prestige and power as the Cameroonian state begins the process of secular democratization. The film evokes a profoundly human theme: what are the existential dimensions of love and loss?
In her latest production, Wives, which was filmed between 1992 and 2015, Holtedahl brings her slow and shared anthropology into the compound of an Islamic scholar, Al Hajji Alkali Ibrahim Goni, who was for 45 years a traditional judge in the aforementioned Sultanate of Issa Maigari. The film showcases the uneven textures of relations between Al Hajii and his many wives, some of whom he divorced, some of whom died, and some of whom he divorced and remarried. In Holtedahl’s words, the film describes the “various household scenes of everyday life events and interviews. With this, I hope to identify the audio-visual material’s contribution to my understanding of marriage, love and dependency of six of Al Hajji’s wives and their husband.” At the end of the film Al Hajii Goni, tired and old, is approaching death. From the intimate inside the audience sees the how the spread of
death’s shadow cuts to the core of Al Hajji Goni’s humanity and how it changes deep-seated feelings of love and loss in a household so far removed from our experience. In so doing, Holtedahl makes the strange familiar. In so doing she uses slow and shared anthropology to create emotional and social connections in an increasingly disconnected world.
These intimate and deeply human films are the result of Lisbet Holtedahl’s gradually developed shared anthropology. Like Jean Rouch among the Songhay, Holtedahl spent decades of field time among the Fulani of Northern Cameroon. She learned to speak fluent Fulfulde enabling her to cultivate longstanding friendships with a wide variety of people in the region. In time this slow approach enhanced her sensitivity to the human dilemmas of her subjects, which, in turn, has given her films, like those of Rouch, an uncanny tenderness, a seductive informality and no small measure of pathos.
Shared Anthropology and Situated Practice
If scholars commit to doing long-term fieldwork, a commitment that spans many decades, they become sensitive to the accountability of their work. How will the people they have described in articles, books and films respond to their professional work? Will they understand it? Will anthropological texts and images misrepresent them? Will they offend them? These issues, of course, have long been of deep anthropological concern – especially so now that social media makes anthropological work so much more accessible to the “represented.” Like physicians, most contemporary anthropologists subscribe to the healer’s oath: do no harm.
And yet, despite the best of efforts, medical procedures sometimes inadvertently do a great deal of harm. The same, of course, can be said of anthropological essays, ethnographies, and ethnographic films.
This issue is of particular importance in visual anthropology. Through social media, images travel far and wide. They sometimes unintentionally project scenes that reinforce
Figure 2: Lisbet Holtedahl speaking at the Crossing Paths: A Conference in Celebration of Visual Anthropology and the Work of Professor Lisbet Holtedahl, University of Tromsø, June 02, 2017. Photograph: Trond Waage.
primitivist and racist ideologies. In 1992, Wilton Martinez’s essay: “Who constructs anthropological knowledge?” demonstrated the pervasiveness of the misinterpretation of ethnographic visual images. Based upon surveys of ethnographic film audiences, Martinez found that many ethnographic films – even well-known classics – have tended to reinforce primitivist stereotypes, the very worst spectator outcome an anthropologist might experience. Martinez (1992: 132) “found many students decode films in an ‘aberrant’ way (Eco, 1979) with relatively high levels of disinterest, ‘culture shock’ and/or alienation, and with a relatively low level of ‘understanding’ (correspondent with textual and pedagogical intended meanings).” These inconvenient findings mean that scholars, especially image- making anthropologists, need to take care as they come to terms with arenas of negative audience interpretations.
In contemporary anthropology then, representational challenges are monumental. If one is a writer, how does she or he craft a “faithful” and “representative” text in which readers are inspired to “turn the page?” For the filmmaker, how does one lure the audience into a sensuous visual world in a way that does not reinforce destructive stereotypes. For great practitioners like Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl the answer, which is consistent with Martinez’s findings about the “readability” of narrative films, is deceptively simple:
one entices audiences with stories gleaned from slowly developed friendships that are full of love and loss. The texture of an essay or film, then, devolves from the quality of the social connections between the anthropologist and the people he or she attempts to represent.
Taking his cue from the film practices of Robert Flaherty who, in search of collaborative input, showed his unfinished films to his Inuit subjects, Jean Rouch decided early on to make collaborative films among the Songhay and Dogon of Niger and Mali. For more than 30 years, he collaborated with his Nigerien sidekicks – Damoure Zika, Lam Ibrahim and Tallou Mouzarane – to make films that joyously celebrated the often inexplicable complexities of ever-changing social life in West Africa. In a film practice grounded in his longstanding friendships with Nigeriens, Rouch always concerned himself with the audience. He often talked about three audiences. He liked to say: I am the first audience. Does the film work for me? The second audience is comprised of the people in front of the camera. What do the subjects think about the film? Is it faithful to their lived realities? The third group is the broader public. What can the film teach about the human condition? If all three audiences like a work, Rouch would say, the film “will give birth to other films.”
In the early 1950s Jean Rouch had footage of what was to become Bataille sur le grand fleuve (1952), a film about the great hippopotamus hunters of Firgoun, Niger. Rouch brought the unfinished footage of the hippo hunt to Ayoru, a Niger River market town, near Firgoun. He nailed a sheet to a mudbrick wall and, using a portable generator, projected his footage. The Firgoun hippo hunters silently watched the projection. When Rouch asked for comments, the Firgoun hunters, immediately understood the language of film, critiqued what they had seen, objecting to the background stock music that, like an invisible intruder, accompanied the hunters on their quest. They said that noise (cosongo, in Songhay) would spoil the hunt. Accordingly, Rouch removed the background music from his film.
(see Henley 2010).
Like Rouch, Holtedahl’s shared anthropology compelled her to become profoundly sensitive to local responses to her work. In their essay on these issues, Arnsten and Holtedahl (2005: 69) wrote:
Our preoccupation with the recipient should be seen mainly as a result of many years’ of preoccupation with the impact on society of research-based knowledge. Our engagement
with film and our attempts to create and disseminate knowledge by use of film as a tool have proved to be very useful for such an appreciation. When analyzing the situatedness of knowledge and focusing on the person who is supposed to “receive” “the knowledge,”
it is necessary to differentiate possible positions of the receiver. When anthropologists are in the filed interacting with local “informants”, i.e. with their research partners, they have notions about who will be their target groups. They see themselves processing material for future dissemination. The target group persons have qualities and interests. We think that these notions are relevant for the anthropologists’ observations and behavior. But the research partners, too, have their target groups: First of all, they are each other’s audience in the social situations. In addition, they are often conscious of other audiences or target groups with which they are more or less familiar: the future readers of the anthropologists’ book and viewers of his/her film.
Audiences of people who have been in front of the camera, of course, have their own subjective interpretations of what they are seeing. As Arnsten and Holtedahl suggest, anthropologists should take these issues very seriously – a consequence of slowly developed shared anthropology.
Vulnerability
Even if scholars carefully anticipate many of the negative reactions to their works and take care to craft a good story, there is still no guarantee that a text or film will resonate with readers or audiences. There are books and films that hit all the right notes – good stories, sensuous descriptions, breathtaking cinematography, and seamless editing – but somehow remain obscure, unread, unwatched, and uninspiring.
What is missing from these books and films?
One deceptively simple answer is: characters who are vulnerable – imperfect human beings whose life stories compel readers or audiences to connect. In his films Jean Rouch understood this important element of storytelling. In Rouch’s Jaguar, the audience meets four young Nigeriens, each with his own set of social problems, meet the challenges of their times – earning wage labor or entrepreneurial profits in the Colonial Gold Coast in order to help their struggling families in Niger. On their epic journey through today’s Burkina Faso, Togo, and Ghana, they stumble here and there. In a variety of tense and funny scenes, they reveal their prejudices and express the wonder of the new. Through extraordinary bricolage, they somehow make their way to Kumasi where they open a small shop, Petit à petit l’oiseau fait son nid (Little by little the bird makes its nest). They sell nyama-nyama (a little of this and a little of that) and make money. As I have witnessed countless times, audiences in Niger, Europe and North America follow the protagonists with intense interest. Against all odds, they save enough money to bring home the bounty of their exotic mission to the edge of the world. Upon their return they heroically give away all that they had earned. Indeed, in all of his innovative films of ethno-fiction (Jaguar, La pyramide humaine, Moi – un noir, not to forget Chronique d’un été, Rouch showcases vulnerable characters – men and women, old and young, West Africans, and French. Within and between the frames of these classic films, these vulnerable characters open their being to the world. They invite viewers to enter their complicated worlds. Their poignant stories connect viewers to a different set of insights that are unveiled in a new world. In my experience, audiences tend accept this invitation and learn something new.
It takes time and patient persistence to evoke the complexities of character in a text or film, a lesson well gleaned from Lisbet Holtedahl’s recent film, Wives for which Holtedahl brought her slow and shared anthropology into the compound of an Islamic scholar, Al Hajji Alkali Ibrahim Goni, the aforementioned traditional judge in the aforementioned Adamawa Sultanate of Issa Maigari. In Holtedahl’s words, the film describes the “various household scenes of everyday life events and interviews. With this, I hope to identify the audio-visual material’s contribution to my understanding of marriage, love and dependency of six of Al Hajji’s wives and their husband.” At the end of the film Al Hajii Goni, tired and old, is approaching death. He opens himself to the audience. Viewers have shared his triumphs, his disappointments, his pride of craft and his personal remorse. In the face of death his dignity draws the audience to him and compels viewers to remember him – a model for us all.
Embracing vulnerability is a risky proposition. It violates what Mary Louise Pratt (1986), long ago called “conventions of representation.” For his part Rouch invented a new genre, ethno-fiction, to underscore the vulnerabilities of men and women confronting the decay of West African colonialism, the irrevocable change brought on by independence, and the ugly persistence of racism – themes that are still very much with us in the world. For her part, Holtedahl took such time and care in her fieldwork that a Fulani cleric allowed her camera of intimacy to record his most private moments and his most deeply guarded emotions, and this among a people known for their deep reserve and rectitude (Riesman 1977). You could say that Rouch and Holtedahl went “rogue” in their films to depict human vulnerabilities, depictions that move audiences to engage in a powerfully silent Buberian I-Thou dialogue – a powerful way for people to think a new thought or feel a new feeling.
On the Slow Path Toward Wisdom
Authors of ethnographic works that remain open to the world try to make sure that that human emotion and vulnerability are foregrounded in the text or showcased within and between the frames of films. Following the epistemological path of wise Songhay and Fulani elders Rouch and Holtedahl practiced slow anthropology well before the invention of the Slow Food Movement, which was initially a protest against the opening of a McDonalds, the icon of fast food establishments, near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In 1986, Carlo Petrini, an Italian activist and journalist, informally organized the slow food movement. In Paris in 1989 Petrini and others formally founded their International movement. Here is their manifesto.
FOR THE DEFENSE OF AND THE RIGHT TO PLEASURE INTERNATIONAL SLOW FOOD MANIFESTO
Born and nurtured under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modelled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: the ‘fast life’ that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest ‘fast- food.’ Homo sapiens must regain wisdom and liberate itself from the ‘velocity’ that is propelling it on the road to extinction. Let us defend ourselves against the universal madness of ‘the fast life’ with tranquil material pleasure. Against those – or, rather, the vast majority – who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.
Appropriately, we will start in the kitchen, with Slow Food. To escape the tediousness of
‘fast-food’, let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines. In the name of productivity, the ‘fast life’ has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes. Slow Food is the alternative, the avant-garde’s riposte. Real culture is here to be found. First of all, we can begin by cultivating taste, rather than impoverishing it, by stimulating progress, by encouraging international exchange programs, by endorsing worthwhile projects, by advocating historical food culture and by defending old-fashioned food traditions. Slow Food assures us of a better quality lifestyle. With a snail purposely chosen as its patron and symbol, it is an idea and a way of life that needs much sure but steady support.
From its very beginning, the Slow Food Movement was less a platform for recipes for sumptuous slow cooking than a sustained cultural critique of life in the fast lane of contemporary society. It has been a critique of the endless array of “tasteless” offerings in fast food restaurants, the widespread anonymity of Facebook “friendships,” the dearth of face-to- face conversations as well as the global corporatization of social relations.
The narrative contours of the films of Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl created a context in images for slow professing in the academy. As Maggie Berg and Barbara K.
Seeber suggest in their wonderful book, The Slow Professor (2016), the corporatization of higher education has diverted our attention from the principal missions of colleges and universities: (1) supporting scholarship that enhances our comprehension of the world;
and (2) training students to think critically and write clearly so they can become engaged and productive citizens. Berg and Seeber in fact, claim that the culture of speed in higher education has created so much tedious “make-work” that professors and students have little time to read, think or write. Berg and Seeber recommend that professors and students slow down to rediscover the essence of higher education and to reconstitute the fundamental and productive bond that emerges in the relationship of professor to student. In the face of widespread bureaucratization, they also offer common-sense suggestions for recapturing the magic of contemplative and creative higher education. For Berg and Seeber, citing Petrini (2007:183) slow professing should not be simply considered as the juxtaposition slow and fast; rather the contrast “between attention and distraction; slowness, in fact, is not so much a question of duration as of an ability to distinguish and evaluate, with the propensity to cultivate pleasure, knowledge, and quality.” As Berg and Seeber (2016: 90-91) write:
“Distractedness and fragmentation characterize contemporary academic life; we believe that Slow ideals restore a sense of community and conviviality…. As envisioned in our manifesto, Slow professors act with purpose, cultivating emotional and intellectual resistance to the effects of the corporatization of higher education.”
Enter the discipline of anthropology which is well suited to fit into the ever-expanding matrix of slowness. As the work of Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl has demonstrated, anthropology has the particular distinction of being a slow science in a fast world. It takes us many years to develop anthropological insights – years spent listening to the people anthropologists encounter in the field. This slow practice has produced the ethnographic record, an invaluable body of knowledge that underscores the wisdom of “others,” a wisdom that we would be wise to extend to the social, cultural and political infelicities that constitute our contemporary culture of speed.
Slow anthropology, however, is more than “taking your time” to conduct long-term field research and then carefully crafting ethnographic books and film; it is also about the gradual maturation of knowledge. Jean Rouch learned this principle from Songhay elders
in the Republic of Niger who have long understood the power of slowness. In my own education, these kind and patient elders insisted that as a young man I must first learn the rudimentary elements of sorcerous knowledge. They forced me to slow down. “That’s enough talk for now,” they would tell me on my visits to Niger. “Come back next year,” they would tell me, “to continue to learn.” “But I want to learn more,” I’d tell my teachers with no small amount of impatience. “You’re not ready yet,” they’d tell me. “Come back next year.”
My apprenticeship with Adamu Jenitongo spanned 17 years. Toward the end of his life, he told me: “You have lived among us for a long time, but to understand us you must grow old with us.” When Adamu Jenitongo’s death brought an end to my apprenticeship in 1988, I thought I had learned a great deal. As time passed by, I realized that despite my 17-year apprenticeship to a Songhay elder, my comprehension of things about Songhay lacked depth.
It took me more than 25 years and a confrontation with serious illness for me to understand that sorcery was not simply a competition for power, but a quest for well- being. Unseasoned sorcerers might unleash lethal “work” to harm or kill an enemy, but practitioners like Adamu Jenitongo used their mature knowledge and power to promote harmony, conviviality and health – well-being. Adamu Jenitongo taught me this central lesson early on in my fieldwork but I did not have the wherewithal – the experience of love and loss--to “see” what he had been “really” teaching me. Back then, he had planted in me the seeds of knowledge; it took the passage of time and a confrontation with mortality for me to finally understand my teacher’s teaching.
In the slow world of Songhay sorcery, illness is a great teacher. It challenges the student to see himself or herself clearly. It sensitizes a person to the pain and suffering of others. It compels one to understand that a person’s greatest obligation – as a sorcerer or as a scholar – is to pass slowly acquired knowledge on to the next generation. In so doing the sorcerers, scholars, filmmakers and anthropologists, open themselves to the world. In so doing they are likely to find the resolve to invent a new genre, like Jean Rouch, to make profoundly intimate films, like Lisbet Holtedahl, or to understand how a confrontation with illness might compel a person to return to where he or she began and, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, know it for the first time (Eliot 1968).
When anthropologists begin a slow T.S. Eliot-style anthropological journey, they may well eventually come back to the beginning and know the place for the first time. Perhaps they’ll realize that like all scientific truths, anthropological concepts are fleeting. They have their initial moments of a bright insight and then fade back into obscurity. During my time as a linguist and anthropologist so many concepts have appeared as “the next new thing” and then faded away. Here is a partial list of golden – and not so golden – oldies: transformational grammar, generative semantics, conversational analysis, discourse analysis, ethno-science, symbolic anthropology, Marxist anthropology, political economy, French structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, globalization and multi-sited anthropology, human rights discourses, the ontological turn. The anthropological writing on these theoretically varied topics has contributed significantly to our comprehension of the human condition, but I wonder how much of this writing will be remembered?
Slow ethnographers produce texts and films that are more likely to remain open to the world – to be read, seen and debated. More than 50 years after they first appeared, Jean Rouch’s films continue to underscore the fragility of human being. They teach us about
ugliness, of hatred and the courage of the oppressed. Lisbet Holtedahl’s films evoke profound dignity in the face of love and loss, themes that connect us all.
Beyond the theoretical flavor of the day, our discipline’s great gift to the world is the ethnographic record, which through prose narrative or through film image, can forge memorable bonds between writers and readers, between filmmakers and their audiences.
These are Slow Movement bonds that take us a step closer to a more convivial present.
Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl have walked this slow path toward knowledge. It is a way filled with respect for the lessons of the elders whose paths lead to wisdom. It is path well worth taking.
Acknowledgments
This article is adapted from a keynote address delivered to an international conference,
“Crossing Paths: A Conference in Celebration of Visual Anthropology and the Work of Professor Lisbet Holtedahl,” delivered at The University of Tromsø, June 02, 2017. Many thanks to Professor Trond Waage for inviting me to speak and to Professor Lisbet Holtedahl for her inspiring corpus of work in visual anthropology.
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Contact: A. David Napier d.napier@ucl.ac.uk
© 2020 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography
Sensuous Scholarship and the Quest for Wellbeing
A. David Napier | Professor of Medical Anthropology, University College London
ABSTRACT The Enlightenment introduced a concept of human identity based on rationalism, science, and individual achievement. At the same time, German Romanticism of the 18th century recognized that self-awareness and self-fulfilment were the outcomes of emotion and intuition, and the relationship between personal experience and individual emotion. The conflict was epitomized in Sturm und Drang (‘storm and drive’) where the extreme expression of individual emotional states emerged in response to rationalism’s perceived degradation of emotional life.
Here by contrast human wellbeing lost its emotional completeness when reason emerged as the primary source of knowledge. As such, wellbeing was something only consciously recognized once lost, because individuation itself limits the kind of social extroversion that is essential for exploring the relevance of the senses for harmonious social embeddedness. By contrast modern anthropology has shown how emotional rootedness, being the basis of wellbeing, can be recaptured through sustained fieldwork, and, in particular, through the extroverted risk that builds emotional rootedness with others.
Keywords: wellbeing, Goethe, Stoller, uncertainty, higher education, creativity, Enlightenment, Romanticism
What is wellbeing?
Back in the 18th century the polymath, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, had a great deal to say about human emotional suffering and perceived wellbeing. Though Goethe lived into his 80s, he did not need a long life to represent the pulse of his time. In fact, he became famous at quite a young age by writing a novel about unrequited love in which the protagonist, Werther, eventually ends his own life.
Born in 1749, Goethe was a mere 24-year-old when he approached the completion of a book that defined for an entire culture what we would now call a ‘best seller’. Following its publication in 1774, the novel soon became wildly popular, even leading many young German men to follow in Werther’s steps by taking their own lives. That’s because The Sorrows of Young Werther was a book for its time. The then-recent rise of the German Enlightenment had left many living with the idea that anything should be possible in life if we set our free intelligence upon achieving it. Indeed, Goethe’s own life was a testament to such success.
But being self-made is a noble thought with a dark conclusion. For if all is possible through clear thinking, failure leaves only the self to blame. Amongst those who fell short of self-fulfillment, not achieving was either the effects of bad luck – a hopeless fate out of one’s hands – or a flaw of character resulting in a squandered opportunity. Under such conditions what could an honourable person do? The no-win situation of failing under rationalism left many, as today, feeling hopeless and without purpose. Hence, Werther’s radical choice became fatally popular.
In reaction to such feelings of failure, German Romanticism emerged – Sturm und Drang (“storm and urge/anxiety”) – in which the open expression of deep emotional angst would shock readers and theatre audiences into transcending the Enlightenment’s deeply flawed presumptions. Paradoxically, Werther stood for Germany of that era, while Goethe himself became perhaps the Enlightenment’s most successful intellectual in his own life. Not only did he emerge as the best-known poet author of the late 18th century, he was also a Renaissance polymath.
A successful civil servant, scientist, urban planner, artist, and statesman, Goethe travelled widely, and especially to Italy where he fell in love with Italian art and architecture.
He also accumulated a vast collection of fine art, and in his later years was followed around by sycophants who literally recorded every moment of his life, including his habits of toilet.
In a sense, he became too well known. Though he tried repeatedly to host soirées at his home in Weimar, neighbours stopped attending because the discussion always seemed to revert to Goethe himself and his ideas. He quite literally became the prisoner of his own success – a fact in itself unremarkable, unless we think about what kind of ‘success’ the lost love of Werther stood for.
Goethe knew this fact; for in his collected letters he gives hints of the deeper causes of Werther’s loss. Though the specific event that drove Werther was unrequited love, the cause that lead to his death in the novel was not only a love he could not consummate: Werther’s loss was the loss of wellbeing that becomes apparent only in its absence. Like any of us imagining simpler times, Werther laments for his readers the moment when hope no longer, as Alexander Pope (2016) wrote in his Essay on Man, ‘springs eternal’ – where ‘Man never Is, but always To be blest’. To put it simply, Werther to the contrary could not imagine how wellbeing could be regained.
We know this to be true because Goethe said as much. In his writing Goethe claimed that “we experience the fullest sense of wellbeing when we are unaware of our parts and conscious only of the whole itself” (Bell 2016). Wellbeing, in other words, is a thing only known in a kind of belonging and stability that is largely unconscious, and only recognized consciously, therefore, once lost.
Yes, we may say at any given moment that we ‘feel good’, or that something gives us
‘a good feeling’; but, as Goethe well knew, perceived wellbeing carries with it the implicit awareness of an unconscious moment now polluted by conscious thought – as if wellbeing were a part of a past no longer available to us. The more we think about our wellbeing, that is, the more we cling to a memory invaded by the knowledge that consciousness itself can undo our emotional wholeness. To put it another way, the more consciously we describe what we remember, the more in the past we resides, to the point where we wonder if such innocence can ever be regained.
No doubt, Goethe, like other German Romantics of the era, was haunted by this problem – that is, the problem of consciousness. And that downside of conscious awareness, in turn, became a theme that ran through much of Goethe’s work, and especially his characterization of Faust.
Unlike Werther, who knows his innocence is lost to the past, Faust actively sells his soul to the devil to ‘know’ anything and everything rationally, so as consciously to control human destiny. Faust was for Goethe the paragon of self-conscious individual reflection.
That’s because Faust’s flaw was to put himself above emotional life – to prioritize his personal
desires as calculations with the devil; to become an individual loner – a narcissist who placed merit in having things for himself at all cost.
Goethe, thus, sees Faust in direct contrast to Romantic fulfillment, because we need to feel we belong in order to feel whole. And when that belonging is disrupted by our individuality, by the awareness that our sense of belonging has been undermined either by nostalgic feelings about an innocence lost (Werther) or by rational self-interest (Faust), a profound isolation eventually ensues that makes life impossible. As Goethe concluded,
“life in its wholeness is expressed as a force not attributable to any individual part of an organism”. Wellbeing, that is to say, cannot be individuated.
An Anthropology and the Senses
Were Goethe alive today, he would find many sympathetic souls engaged in studying the anthropology of emotions (Howes and Classen 2014), but probably few as devoted to the senses specifically as Paul Stoller (1989, 1997b 2008). For much of Stoller’s writing has focused on how our sensuous experiences can define new emotional registers through which sensation itself make our lives meaningful.
In particular, Stoller has tried to bring to life the spaces between us (2008) – the places where, to remember Goethe, ”wholeness is expressed as a force not attributable to any individual part”. Stoller has, also like Goethe, struggled with how we express those sensations in writing, and, perhaps most challenging of all, how we translate our own inchoate sensations for readers (1989, 1997b).
From early writings as a Songhay sorcerer’s apprentice (1995, 1997a; Stoller and Oalkes 1989), through his work on film and art (1992), to evocative stories of what he calls ‘sensuous scholarship’ (1997b) (including the sensations induced by his own illness experience [2004]), Stoller has never strayed far from the question of how we build emotional meaning by taking risks with the unknown, and with the new and often strange sensation of seeing ‘Oneself as Another’, to recall Paul Ricoeur’s beautiful phrase and book title (1995).
And what has Stoller discovered? In addition to acknowledging the importance of our senses in building social meaning, Stoller, as Goethe once did, acknowledges the compounding effects of incorporating our emotions into our observations of and engagements with others.
We need to trust others to feel well ourselves, to build emotional ties with the unknown through sensuous engagement. Here, wellbeing is not only about social stability, but about a sense of emotional rootedness that makes possible a life fully realized. Indeed, it is this sense of being socially embedded to which Paul Stoller alludes when he describes the importance of long-term, engaged fieldwork.
But perhaps that’s where the comparison ends. Because while Goethe did indeed understand the deep need for emotional wholeness, his focus on the effects of its disruption were informed by the intellectual concerns of his day – and perhaps most by Spinoza’s
‘vitalism’ (Bennet 2010). For Spinoza was a rationalist when it came to religious orthodoxy, but a romantic when it came to ontology – even at times a pantheist when describing the immanence of nature and the deindividuation that can allow us to appreciate our emotional rootedness. For Goethe, this rational ‘loss’ made wellbeing part of an innocence lost, a view which by definition places it in the past.
To put it differently, wellbeing for German Romantics was largely something recognized consciously in its emotional absence – either in unselfconscious conviviality,
or in ontological dissociation, or through the way consciousness itself disrupts perceived wellbeing. Because the actual experience of wellbeing is different than our reflections on it.
Wellbeing, to push this line of thought, is about not consciously recognizing anything.
It is the feeling of being productively embedded in wholesome social relations – a kind of
‘selective dissociation’ (Napier 1992) where we allow ourselves to exist harmoniously in what my Indonesian friends call ‘the flow of life’ (Fox 1990). For wellbeing implies the ability to count on a coherent world and to rely on those around us to be there when we need them.
It is about believing in the enduring nature of things outside us. In short, it is about social trust, and about recognizing the loss we feel when continuity is disrupted through our reflecting on a past now possibly destabilized by the very act of reflecting on it.
Thus, because we by definition can only in hindsight be consciously aware of a lost unconscious belonging, we can neither measure wellbeing as a present condition, nor define it as a conscious reflection on a state of present being. In this sense, wellbeing (for Romantics at least) is a thing named in the present, but belonging to the past; for its recognition involves a form of reflection on a feeling undisturbed by reflection. That’s why there are hundreds of definitions of wellbeing that somehow fail to capture it.
Wellbeing is a thing felt, not thought – a dynamic steady state – and our thinking of wellbeing signals the very insecurity that characterizes a past we now see at risk, a conceptual warning of what we fear losing, a need for others to help create new moments of collective agreement in which hope can again emerge.
For, when life is going well for us, we permit ourselves to take things for granted. It’s only when that which is taken-for-granted turns out to be otherwise – when our inductive assumptions prove wrong – that we simultaneously become aware of our aloneness while remembering the bliss we’ve now lost. Thus, wellbeing is not at all what any of us think, because it is thoughtless – its fullness being known in the belonging we so much feel the need for when belonging suddenly disappears – when lost hope must urgently be replaced by the belief that belonging can be remade.
That, in short, is why addressing the drivers of social trust is critical to understanding wellbeing’s loss; for reflecting on wellbeing sets trust seeking in motion, a coded way of acknowledging our desire to generate trust with others. The many calls today for human wellbeing and sustainable prosperity are, in other words, ways of spawning an awareness that society itself is indeed quite unwell, and that we need to work together to fix it.
The Role of Uncertainty
Yet, while wellbeing may be (quite literally) not what you or I think, it is wrong to believe that ignorance is bliss; for ignorance cannot be recognized without knowing. As a homeless friend once put it, “You don’t know what you don’t know; because not knowing defines ignorance”. The rhetoric of wellbeing, on the other hand, is the result of knowing, a perception of the past that emerges in the past’s absence – that is through knowledge.
By contrast, existentialism (and especially the existential phenomenology that informs the anthropology of Paul Stoller) is not only about rethinking the past as a creatively embodied exercise. It is also, because of this creative possibility, about emotional gain, about taking our sufferings and making not only new meaning, but artful meaning – even if that demands taking a flaw, as the Baroque sculptor, Bernini, once said, and turning it so much into the centerpiece of a new work of art that the new work could not have existed
without it. Indeed, this hope – that wellbeing is also about emotional gain – is what incites anthropologists, like Paul Stoller, to take certain risks with the unknown, and to take them again and again.
In this sense, engaged fieldwork over a lifetime is about the emotional gain we hope for when we acknowledge that fulfillment is not the personal experience we so often make of it in the self-help books that millions read. It’s not, that is, just about coming to grips with one’s own mortality; it’s about embeddedness. For no amount of success can make a person feel well while living in complete isolation.
Were this otherwise, we would not witness so much deep unhappiness in countries where material welfare is secure; nor would we have those who have abundant resources fleeing violent environments for global capitals where they feel they can express their successes under the watchful eyes of every other upwardly mobile person on earth. Wellbeing, in other words, requires the ‘Other’.
Indeed, what emerges in Stoller’s view of wellbeing is the importance of experiencing both the unknown and the ineffable that together allow us to witness more creatively what is feasible in our own lives. This need is what brings Stoller to focus on the life-long work of engaged fieldworkers like Jean Rouch and Lisbet Holtedahl. Knowledge of the deep emotionality of how others make meaning is a kind of knowledge that is only gained by taking risks with difference.
Thus, wellbeing is not only a thing recognized in the past – something unfettered by critical thinking – but a human potential. Here, knowledge emerges as the inevitable foundation for remaking ourselves – the foundation for making better rather than poorer meaning; the basis for recreating a fuller life with others. That is why exploring boundaries is critical for social health; because that’s how we get new knowledge, create new ideas, and grow emotionally.
Because wellbeing, in this line of thought, is about social trust and the stability that comes of shared awareness, it emerges and remerges through faith: faith that others will be there for us; faith that they will behave mutually in making meaning when wellbeing is threatened. This faith is not only the foundation of wellbeing, but the foundation of society itself – a belief in goodness and its potential. This faith is not only what allows anthropologists to become deeply, and at times even dangerously, involved in the lived experience of other, but the link that allowed Rouch, Holtedahl, and Stoller himself to remain engaged with the very things that otherwise might have undone them.
Faith being central, risk-taking becomes critical. Because faith in others is the outcome of many experiences that collectively lead us to feel we can, even against the odds, create harmony with the world we inhabit. Because counting on others means having the faith that stability can be built. Because feeling life’s continuities gives us the strength to cope with the instabilities that are what life is. And because our many experience of the same event produce, as Aristotle once argued, “the effect of a single experience’’ (Clark 1975). In other words, wellbeing is about wanting inductive certainty as much as it is about a paradise lost – about the belief that mutual social relations can have similarly good outcomes in the future because they have done so in the past.
However, induction itself deserves critical unpacking; because when things turn out to be not what we think, we question ourselves. We ask what went enough wrong to undo our perceived wellbeing. Because when what we learn does not lead to new knowledge, when
our many experience do not allow us to make the right decision at any given moment, the whole enterprise of learning from others is put at risk.
And this is why it is important to listen to what creative anthropologists tell us about the importance of risk-taking in understanding the emotional lives of others. Having known what can be learned from long-term exposure to difference, it becomes our individual responsibility to help safeguard environments that remain open to free thinking when social insecurity strikes.
Human wellbeing, in summary, is as fragile as it is perceived: a healthy nation or globe may be measured by a decline in the impact of a devastating disease; but even a quite healthy population may feel very unwell (Napier et al. 2014). Though societies can gauge themselves against various measures of mortality and morbidity, even the highest of scores on any given measure of physical health will not abate a culture of complaint in which a sense of unhappiness and a divisive mistrust prevail.
Indeed, a nation may be wholly equipped to solve a threat to public health, while still being quite convinced that things are not well at all. At such times, those working to tackle a critical social problem affecting us all may get more meaning from scaring us about the future than from doing something about it.
The persistence of that disjunction – between health and wellbeing – is, therefore, precisely why human wellbeing must now become an educational priority.
Education and Future Wellbeing
Throughout the academic world there is an ongoing conversation about how our moral obligations to the future affect the ways in which we define our disciplines and our professional and personal relationships to them. How do we protect the ‘social contract’ as defined by Locke and Rousseau against Adam Smith’s self-interested formulation, in which the reciprocity of mercantile activities themselves are thought to constitute a social contract that is both binding and reliable?
In my multicultural and very urban university, and in educational setting across the globe, such challenges now coalesce around the areas of intercultural interactions, sustainable environments, global health, and human wellbeing – each reflecting, as it were, both a
‘grand challenge’ to our skill sets across disciplines, as well as an ethical obligation to make things better.
Of these four broad areas, it is surely the last – human wellbeing – that is, as we now recognize, the most difficult to define and to locate in any given field of expertise. What, we may ask, is being measured when the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan promotes a policy of Gross National Happiness? What may be understood in the claim that the citizens of Denmark are Europe’s happiest people? A ‘gross national’ anything is a condition thought to be measurable; yet an expression of happiness may to the contrary express something ineffable. What is more, human wellbeing is defined quite variably. So what actually is being measured?
Unlike ‘health’, ‘survival’, or ‘sustainability’, wellbeing is largely a perceived state, a sense that one’s efforts, even one’s suffering, can have an instrumental and beneficial impact that is widespread. Human wellbeing, in this sense, is a social construct. It is (regardless of how we try to define or assess it) about an individually perceived trust in the social contract;
about the welfare that emerges out of collective investment; about the empathic sensibility that each of us cultivates in the particular social place we inhabit.
Because of these complexities, measuring wellbeing often does not lead where it should – namely, to an acceptance of the social dimensions of perceived goodness. This in itself is surprising. Because, in spite of how exquisite a psychologically controlled measure may appear, the final test of wellbeing always stands outside of what can be experimentally controlled, precisely because it is so profoundly social and experientially negotiated.
This idea is easily demonstrated. Imagine we are in the controlled environment of a hospital ward. As in a lab experiment, we have exacting conditions: two patients side by side with precisely the same bone fracture, the same levels of care, and the same expressions of concern and empathy from caregivers. What might be the social conditions that could give rise to a divergent manifestation of perceived wellbeing?
Think basic concepts; for the issue is about the simple perception of wellness. One of our two patients broke his leg pushing a child out of the way of an oncoming car; the other experienced the same fracture after sliding down an icy staircase left unattended to by a greedy landlord. What we see before us are identical fractures, modes of treatment, and (hopefully) clinical outcomes; however, how wellbeing is understood at the level of perception could not be more different.
Here is another example. Twins live in identical apartments, work identical jobs, and make identical wages. Both flats are directly above a noisy underground station. Both must respond to the repetitive noxious stimulant of the rumbling trains beneath their floors. Both remain in their flats the exact same number of hours, exposed identically to the irritation of train noise and vibration, but one has a summer cottage that, even though never visited, exists as an escape destination. Yet again, the perception of wellbeing of the two could not be more different.
Wellbeing, in other words, is exceedingly difficult to measure, and statements about feeling well or not well cannot in themselves be taken as conclusive proof that all is actually okay. Cultures vary significantly in what is considered to be appropriate expressions of wellness or its absence. Many say they are ‘fine’ on the very day they harm themselves.
Saying one is fine can even indicate its opposite, as so many ‘stiff upper lips’ make clear.
There is an inescapable conclusion here. This being that social wellbeing is difficult to measure (World Health Organization 2015), and not just because it is individually perceived, subject to constant variation, and so often unquantifiable (in spite of what statisticians may claim). Indeed, we know about its resistance to measurement by the very proliferation of research tools that exist to measure it. If one looks at indicators of so-called ‘social capital’ – for example, measures of a society’s willingness to contribute to social wellbeing – one can uncover several hundred definitions, each offering a somewhat different view of what is or is not an indicator of citizen wellbeing.
Such proliferation exists – and let’s register this – not because we need so many instruments, but because social empathy, like wellbeing, is equally challenging to measure.
For our feelings, like human wellbeing itself, so often have less to do with understanding
‘health’ in the strict sense, than with understanding our ability to trust or not trust one another over time.
How do we know that perceived social continuity, and long-term creative engagement with an ‘Other’, are more important to human wellbeing than trying to quantify it? The answer is simple: while it may be time very well spent to refine our indicators of human happiness, the fact remains that perceiving wellbeing – that is, sensing its existence and value – is, as we now recognize, a cumulative endeavor.
